False consciousness

Failure of empowered groups to comprehend that their arguments and beliefs are the products of an oppressive political and social system. As such, the arguments are therefore irrelevant, useless and quite meaningless. Such consciousness can also victimize individuals in marginalized groups who fail to realize that they they are being oppressed by the dominant culture's propaganda.

Neil Gotanda—professor of law at Western State College of Law in Fullerton, California—titled “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind,’” in which he rejected King’s dream of a “colorblind” society.[iii]

Neil Gotanda argued that colorblind racial ideology is a sophisticated mechanism for preserving white supremacy. As he saw it, the insistence that race is irrelevant in law and policy conceals the reality of race, thereby securing for Whites the economic and political advantages that they accumulated in the overtly racist past. At the heart of this theory is Karl Marx’s concept of “false consciousness”—that is, the way in which the exploited working class (the proletariat) internalizes the ideology of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie). This false consciousness renders the proletariat unable to grasp that it is being dominated and exploited.

Marx’s critical theory for interpreting economic and social arrangements is useful for describing the way in which subordinate people in a hierarchical society can be abused. Such abuses should be criticized and corrected. However, the fatal flaw of Marxism and the critical race theory that it spawned (by way of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School) lies in the fact that human society—like the social life of all living creatures—is inescapably hierarchical. This hard reality is evident in the fact that every Marxist-inspired revolution of the 20th century established a new hierarchy that was more abusive than the hierarchy it replaced.